Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday January 14, 2010 @12:11AM
from the wrap-it-up dept.

Terminal illness got you down? Does your future seems bleak? Channel 4 and production company Fulcrum TV would like to brighten your day by making you the star of an upcoming documentary. They would like to offer you the chance to be mummified on TV and maybe even displayed in a museum afterward. An advertisement for the project reads: "We are currently keen to talk to some one who, faced with the knowledge of their own terminal illness and all that it entails, would nonetheless consider undergoing the process of an ancient Egyptian embalming."

I remember watching this done on a modern human over 10 years years ago on discovery networks... it was very cool.

from his wiki article:

"In 1994, Brier and a colleague, Ronald Wade, director of the State Anatomy Board of Maryland, claimed to be the first people in 2,000 years to mummify a human cadaver using ancient Egyptian techniques. This research earned Brier the affectionate nickname "Mr. Mummy" and was also the subject of the National Geographic television special of the same name."

We can never satisfactorily "cure" cancer or any other disease. "Curing" a disease is defined as letting you live long enough to die from a different one.

I know several people who are extremely happy to have been given the chance to die of something other than cancer.

Numbers show that millions of lives have been saved by antibiotics, but have they?

Yes, they have. If without them you would have been dead in days or weeks, but with them you successfully fight off the disease and are no longer in any danger of dying from it, then yes, they did save you. Even if you were hit by a bus and killed on the way home from getting the all-clear, that disease or infection did not kill you, and the antibiotics did save your life.

I agree with the mantra that you should live your life according to the knowledge that it won't last forever, but the rest is needlessly fatalistic imho.